Sunday, January 31, 2016

Bernie Sanders demagogues the email issue

"That is, I think, a very serious issue. There is a legal process taking place, I do not want to politicize that issue. It is not my style." He called the controversy "a serious issue" on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday as well, although again he said he wouldn't make personal attacks on Clinton. "I am not going to attack Hillary Clinton," Sanders told NBC's Chuck Todd. "The American people will have to make that judgment."

Bullshit. Calling her emails "a very serious issue" is in fact a personal and political attack on Clinton.

As a story on Vox points out, this is probably about overclassification, not a security breach by Clinton:

The problem, in other words, isn't that the rules for classification are too strict. It's that the rules are unclear, messy, or contradictory, to the degree that the rules exist at all, and individual people and agencies have learned to overclassify to stay on the safe side.

The problem has grown so severe that it has hampered even the ability of American intelligence officials and policymakers to access the information they need to do their jobs. The head of the 9/11 Commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, told Congress in 2005 that "the failure to share information was the single most important reason why the United States government failed to detect and disrupt the 9/11 plot."

He warned, "Information has to flow more freely. Much more information needs to be declassified. A great deal of information should never be classified at all." (emphasis added)